Welding Equipment Manufacturer Identifies 26% Inventory Reduction Opportunity with AI

A world leader in welding and cutting equipment with 20 manufacturing plants and substantial global inventory relied on a labor-intensive Plan for Every Part (PFEP) approach requiring manual data aggregation across multiple dashboards and spreadsheets. This resulted in infrequent updates, inconsistent replenishment strategies, and an inability to scale inventory optimization across their global operations.

The manufacturer deployed C3 AI Inventory Optimization in a rapid timeframe, integrating three years of historical data comprising 5 million rows across 8 North American facilities. The system generated over 25 million simulations to determine ideal Safety Stock or Reorder Point at a SKU-location level, built an extensible data model with 18 logical objects, and fully automated the calculation of new reorder parameters.

C3 AI Inventory Optimization identified a 26% overall inventory reduction opportunity — equating to $10 million in potential savings across 8 North American facilities and $100 million potential reduction globally — while simultaneously increasing material availability. The manufacturer now has a unified view of global inventory with automated, optimized reorder parameters.

• Running 25 million simulations per SKU-location enables a precision of inventory optimization that is fundamentally unreachable with manual PFEP spreadsheet approaches. • A simultaneous 26% inventory reduction with availability improvement demonstrates that AI optimization does not require a service-level tradeoff. • Scaling from 8 North American facilities to a global model multiplies the ROI by 10x, making the initial deployment investment highly justifiable.